In Review: Big Finish: Doctor Who: The Trouble With Drax

Altrazar. The temporal Atlantis, a place lost to time. Believed by many to be a myth, it has long been the perfect location for the rich and powerful to hide away their most dangerous secrets.

Until now.

Because the somewhat crooked, not exactly honest, wheeler-dealer cockney Time Lord known as Drax has found a map that leads to its location. And, at the behest of a manipulative businessman, he’s going to use it.

When the TARDIS is dragged out of the space-time vortex, its crew aren’t best pleased to see the Doctor’s old school friend, even less when he pressgangs them into joining a raid on the most secure safe-house in history. However with Romana and K9 held hostage, the Doctor has little choice but to agree. With Drax in tow, he heads for the planet.

Which is where the trouble starts.

Review: According to the Extra Interviews, John Dorney wrote Doctor Who: The Trouble With Drax as an homage to the late Barry Jackson. Jackson had been set to reprise his role from “The Armageddon Factor” for this Big Finish story a few weeks before his death. Dorney crafted a story that wasn’t just an homage to a much loved character actor, though. He crafted a story that was an homage to Time Lord mythology in general.

Specifically, Dorney penned a wonderful love letter to the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. However, a writer can’t spin a yarn in which a crooked Time Lord breaks a cardinal rule without the help of some really great actors. Ray Brooks, John Challis, Hugh Fraser, Miranda Raison, and the versatile John Leeson made the everybody done it caper comedy possible. What’s more, everybody done it and got away for more trouble and future Big Finish recording sessions.

As ever, Baker and Ward shine, but this is one of the rare occasions when the story isn’t about the Doctor and Romana’s dynamic. It’s Drax who is center stage, and he goes to marvelously absurd lengths to get there.

Raissa Devereux became a life-long genre fan at the age of four when she first saw The Wizard of Oz at a screening at Arizona State University. Years later, she graduated from A.S.U. as an English major, History minor, Whovian, and Trekkie. Now a Florida transplant, she loves the opportunity Sci-Fi Pulse has given her to further explore space travel, time travel, masked heroes, gothic castles, and good yarns.

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